In Burkhead, a patient received medical services at a hospital after an automobile accident. During her treatment, she signed two “Consent: Authorization, Assignment, and Acknowledgment” forms in which she ostensibly assigned to the hospital “all rights to or claims for payment against third parties” for the reasonable value of medical services rendered. The hospital subsequently attempted to intervene in the patient’s personal injury lawsuit and filed its own suit against the tortfeasor. In both cases, the hospital sought to recover the expenses it incurred in treating the patient from the tortfeasor directly and pursuant to the patient’s purported assignment.

The Alaska Supreme Court held that the patient’s purported assignment of her personal injury claim to the hospital was not valid. The court explained that

People complain about the snail’s pace of civil litigation. It takes a minimum of a year for almost any case to get to trial. Bigger and more complex cases take even longer.

If you ask around, you find that many civil litigation lawyers blame the delay on all the family law cases. The trial courts are clogged with divorce, child custody, division of marital property, domestic violence, and child in need of aid proceedings. The judges spend so much time refereeing for all these angry people who for one reason or another can’t run their own lives that they have no time to deal with the “regular” civil lawsuits. (You know, the really important “regular” civil cases, like the ones involving a slip and fall in a grocery store, or a State of Alaska employee who is unfairly disciplined for being an impossible jerk who won’t do any real work.)

It used to be that the Anchorage Superior Court had one particular judge assigned to handle the family law cases. But that practice was never actually authorized by statute so it was abandoned a while back. Now, all the Superior Court judges on the civil side get a slice of the family law cases, whether they want them or not. The civil judges have to juggle all these prickly family law disputes where emotions run high with their “regular” caseload where usually only something unimportant like millions of dollars are at stake.